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Stephen Christopher Stamper - Echoic RM015

Echoic is inspired by the term “echoic memory”. Credited to Ulric Neisser, a significant figure in the development of cognitive science, echoic memory, or auditory sensory memory, is part of the short-term memory and refers to the way the brain can take an exact copy of what is heard and hold it for very short periods, roughly two to four seconds.

In the following, the artist describes how the connection between the album and term came about:

“The genesis of this album came from a shoebox full of old cassette tapes I had been dragging around for well over 20 years. Containing recordings made by my friends and I, these cassettes had slowly morphed from a type of hastily scribbled musical sketchpad into a tangible form of long-term memory: fragments of thoughts and ideas encoded deep within the tape’s magnetic subconscious.

Fearful of losing these precious memories, or at the very least the means to retrieve them, I pulled my barely functioning Walkman out of storage and began the long and arduous task of digitising this irreplaceable archive.

An unforeseen routing issue saw the sound of a 22-year-old living room rehearsal pass through my current live performance set-up. A jumble of digital filters and delays suddenly became my laptop’s echoic memory: audio from up to four seconds ago began to resurface, overlaying the present, forcing me to re-hear once overly-familiar sounds in an entirely new way…”